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by DennisP 36 days ago
Steve Yegge wrote about this in his book Vibe Coding. He says it takes about a year of experience before you're consistently getting good results. He writes about lots of different techniques for doing that, but also says a lot of it comes down to just getting a feel for when the LLM is going to go haywire.
3 comments
noisy_boy 35 days ago
> but also says a lot of it comes down to just getting a feel for when the LLM is going to go haywire

That has been my experience too. The days when I'm very focused, being extra deliberate and constantly questioning/examining/challenging things, the results are much better. Autopilot days just go through in a daze and the outcome is objectively worse. This has made me much more hands-on and pushed me towards models which are actually not that "clever" like codex at effort=low but fast. Given that I'm doing the meat of the thinking, might as well not be slowed down by the model and lose the flow.

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voncheese 35 days ago
+1 to all of this. The challenge can be staying focused and thinking when the AI assistant is (1) moving very fast and (2) often times doing multiple things at the same time.

I know I have struggled to keep up, and fall into the trap of approving things (either commands or recommendations) without taking the time to really process and think about them.

It's a bit like the age old problem of "it's super easy to ask questions, and can be super hard to answer many of them". So the economy of the conversation gets out of whack fast.

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hollowturtle 35 days ago
It's been 4 years of using them for me, before writing a book I'd wait to have a decade of experience to share with others, otherwise it would have the same value as a book on a react tutorial
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datadrivenangel 35 days ago
From what I've heard this is a good assessment of steve's book.
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nijave 35 days ago
I'd say closer to 6 months for me but probably still some room to improve.

I think getting a decent setup with a fast feedback loop for the agent combined with context (in repo markdown)+memories goes a long way.

After having Claude Code "remember" my preferences and tools, it's more efficient.

It has a tendency to copy existing patterns so a good AGENTS.md with best practices and architectural goals goes a long way to prevent it from duplicating patterns you're trying to get rid of.

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